National Review: Only A Monster Would Say The Nazis Didn’t Make Sense

There’s a funny joke that liberals tell each other (okay, I lie, liberals are never funny because they are too busy being offended by non-lesbians) about how if Obama came out against Nazis, conservatives would find a way to defend them.

President Obama issued a statement yesterday to commemorate International Holocaust Remembrance Day. He noted that survivors who bore witness to “the horrors of the cattle cars, ghettos, and concentration camps have witnessed humanity at its very worst and know too well the pain of losing loved ones to senseless violence.” (We noted below how some in Europe chose to mark the day, which takes place each year on January 27, the day Soviet troops liberated Auschwitz.)

The idea that all violence is “senseless” violence is one that has taken deep root on the left; it’s also, unfortunately, one that poses a major impediment to understanding the world.

Nazism may have been an ideology to which the United States was — and to which the president is — implacably opposed, but it is hardly “senseless.”

Say what you will about National Socialism, Dude, at least it’s a fucking ethos.

We mean…uh…what? We hate to go all trite wedding toast on you, but the dictionary defines senseless as “destitute of, deficient in, or contrary to sense.” I think that most people could agree that mass genocide, for whatever purpose, is contrary to any established norm of “sense”. Right? …Right?

No.

By the early 1930s, the Nazi party had hundreds of thousands of devoted members and repeatedly attracted a third of the votes in German elections; its political leaders campaigned on a platform comprising 25 non-senseless points, including the “unification of all Germans,” a demand for “land and territory for the sustenance of our people,” and an assertion that “no Jew can be a member of the race.” Suffice it to say, many sensible Germans were persuaded.

Note to all violent schizophrenics out there: if you just come up with a list of reasons why you’re plotting to murder elected officials, random employees at Subway, or ephemeral ideas that you’ve personified into a talking lobster that smells like lilacs, you officially make sense. But still, thank you for using “comprising” correctly. That pretty much balances out your saying it is sensible to bar Jews from inclusion in your “race.”

We suppose that the author of this post, Eliana Johnson, has a point, in that it’s the left who constantly imbues “senselessness” onto acts of violence and never seeks out the root causes of violence, unlike the right. This seemingly needless hair-splitting that ends up coming off like a tacit defense of Nazis as people who had a point is actually meaningful, given the sharp divide between the right and left on understanding the nature of violence. Take this fucker, for instance, who said:

Those who perished as a result of Nazi terror, millions of individual men and women and children whose lives were taken so senselessly, must never be forgotten.